Time passed, and we were at the end of a three days’ fight near Philippopolis, in the middle of January.  Suleiman Pasha’s army, defeated, disorganized, and at last disbanded, though to that day still unconquered, had finished the tragic act of its last campaign with the heroic stand made in the foothills of the Rhodope Mountains, near Stanimaka, south of Philippopolis.  A long month in the terrible cold, on the summits of the Balkan range; the forced retreat through the snow after the battle of Taskosen; the neck-and-neck race with the Russians down the valley of the Maritza; finally, the hot little battle on the river-bank, and the two days of hand-to-hand struggle in the vine-yard of Stanimaka—­this was a campaign to break the constitution of any soldier.  Days without food, nights without shelter from the mountain blasts, always marching and always fighting, supplies and baggage lost, ammunition and artillery gone—­human nature could hold out no longer, and the Turkish army dissolved away into the defiles of the Rhodopes.  Unfortunately for her, Turkey has no literature to chronicle, no art to perpetuate the heroism of her defenders.

The incidents of that short campaign are too full of horror to be related.  Not only did the demon of war devour strong men, but found dainty morsels for its bloody maw in innocent women and children.  Whole families, crazed by the belief that capture was worse than death, fought in the ranks with the soldiers.  Women ambushed in coverts shot the Russians as they rummaged the captured trains for much-needed food.  Little children, thrown into the snow by the flying parents, died of cold and starvation, or were trampled to death by passing cavalry.  Such a useless waste of human life has not been recorded since the indiscriminate massacres of the Middle Ages.

The sight of human suffering soon blunts the sensibilities of any one who lives with it, so that he is at last able to look upon it with no stronger feeling than that of helplessness.  Resigned to the inevitable, he is no longer impressed by the woes of the individual.  He looks upon the illness, wounds, and death of the soldier as a part of the lot of all combatants, and comes to consider him an insignificant unit of the great mass of men.  At last only novelties in horrors will excite his feelings.

I was riding back from the Stanimaka battle-field sufficiently elated at the prospect of a speedy termination of the war—­now made certain by the breaking up of Suleiman’s army—­to forget where I was, and to imagine myself back in my comfortable apartments in Paris.  I only awoke from my dream at the station where the highway from Stanimaka crosses the railway line about a mile south of Philippopolis.  The great wooden barracks had been used as a hospital for wounded Turks, and as I drew up my horse at the door the last of the lot of four hundred, who had been starving there nearly a week, were being placed upon carts to be transported to the town.  The